Jerry's Mom visits

Jerry's Mom is in town, so we visited with her yesterday. Went out to a salad-bar place for lunch, which was definitely the right choice in this weather.

After we got back to our place, Jerry helped with online electronic gadget shopping while Greg and I played around making peanut sauce recipes. (She asked if we had a recipe, because she knows we have asian cookbooks.) I liked Greg's quite a bit, once it was adjusted to compensate for the near-disastrous overdose of fish sauce, but mine was more like what she'd had in mind. (Peanut butter, hoisin sauce, chili pepper, ginger, garlic, lime juice, water.)

We played "the dice game", which I think is isomorphic to Cosmic Wimpout, and I had this compulsion to figure out what the odds are of rolling no 1s, no 5s, and no triples when rolling 3 dice. (About 35%, so you should go ahead and roll when you've still got 3 dice left.) Strangely enough, I ended up using Excel to do it, because it was fairly easy to use it to enumerate all the permutations, color the scoring ones, and then count the non-scorers. I probably ought to have used equations (builds character), but I've decided lately that I kinda like spreadsheets.

The three of us are all very much our mothers' sons. It's amusing to watch the interplay.

With carryover from the last two weeks, after today I've already worked 25+ hours this week, so I am mostly taking it easy at work. It means if I miss the 8:15 bus in the morning, it's no big deal, which is nice.